


Snapshots from the Road

by eko (togina)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 1980s, Gen, Pre-Series, Young Dean, Young Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-18 07:25:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8153852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/eko
Summary: Maybe John means for them not to have a home, so that they can never lose what they lost when Dean was four. But the boys know where they sleep at night, grow up with bench seats and the hum of the road, with their trigger-happy fingers on the shutter button of an old Polaroid.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when you start watching _Supernatural_ about a decade later than everyone else, and then take a road trip (when you yourself half grew up in the backseat of a car). There could certainly be more where these came from, this is just what occurred to me while dawdling behind a semi in Tennessee.

John forgets Dean’s birthday, the first year _after_ , doesn’t even think about it until sometime in February when a waitress with lines on her face and baby weight lingering around her hips asks Dean how old he is and he holds up four fingers in reply.

(Mary was the one who planned their birthdays. Mary was the one who counted down the days of January with Dean, who baked the chocolate cake and wrapped the gifts and documented the whole thing with a battered Polaroid camera that was the sum of her trousseau. “It's angels painting,” she said, when Dean pressed chubby toddler’s fingers to the edges of the developing picture and asked how it worked. "Same as they painted all those freckles on your nose." Mary had already been planning for Christmas — Sammy’s _first Christmas_ — and it was all gone, burned to the ground with the presents and the camera and his beautiful bride.)

John has to explain to Dean that he’s five, now, (lies and says it’s Dean’s birthday, because he can’t look at his son and tell him that his birthday is gone, up in flames just like everything else in their lives,) takes him to the discount store and tells him to pick anything he wants, expecting a race car the same color as the Impala, or a stuffed dog too big for the backseat.

Dean chooses a camera, a Polaroid the same color as the one they’d lost, the color of cinders and ash, and John has to drag them back through the store for the film. The first picture is of a little boy surrounded by the red upholstery of a restaurant booth, staring wide-eyed at a chocolate cupcake with sprinkles and a candle burning slowly down.

(There’s a shoe box overflowing with Polaroids, by the time Sam leaves, boys making faces too close to the lens, standing next to giant jackalopes and balls of twine and signs like ‘Intercourse, PA’ and ‘Bucksnort, TN’, along with a few slightly more dignified shots of two beansprout boys and their old man. The first time Dean can bear to pull out the box, after Sam leaves, at least a dozen of the pictures are gone. (Sam only frames the one he stole out of the journal, John and Mary before either boy was born. He tucks the others away for safekeeping, blurred smiles and a close-up of Dean's nose one summer, the freckles he'd hated so dense they'd looked like a tan. (It doesn't keep them safe. Sam can't save anything from burning, in the end.))

* * *

Dean learns to read a map before he learns to read — knows his numbers, his dad circles the town they need to get to and where they are, and Dean figures out which numbered roads will get them there, sitting in the backseat next to Sammy with the atlas taking up more of the seat than either of them can. Before – _before_ , Mary had read him _Goodnight Moon_ every evening, after he kissed Sammy goodnight and she tucked them both in. He had memorized the book, learned the words on the page to the sound and cadence of his mother’s voice; just like he would learn to read the world in his father’s gruff tones, “U.S. Highway” and “Main Street” and “No right on red.” (Until he is eight, he writes every long ‘i’ ‘igh’, because that’s how his father says it in ‘highway,’ and how his mother always kissed him ‘goodnight'.)

* * *

There’s a picture of Dean in front of a “Historical Marker, 1 mile” sign – only with his middle finger covering the ‘1’, because they’ve gone past at least _ten_ of these damn signs, and there hasn’t been a marker yet. (Sammy likes to read them, when Dad’s not in too much of a rush: Civil War battles and Lewis and Clark’s march, Stephen F. Austin’s first homestead and grooves in the dirt from hundreds of wagons going west. The boys learn their country in the hard-packed soil under their feet, in the press of stubby fingers to the raised letters of markers scattered along the byways of America like the salt they throw out of the windows to watch it fly.)

* * *

It's over a year before Dad remembers to put Dean in school: first grade, six years old and too big for the kindergarten where Mom had promised he would go, the one in Lawrence with the yellow curtains and the teacher who had taught his parents when they were five. Second grade is a new school (a Polaroid of Dean standing next to the sign, ‘Pillow Elementary School’ dwarfing a boy with a cowlick in his blond hair), and this one has a free preschool attached, someplace to put Sammy while Dad works. Dean walks across the playground to the little building after the last bell rings, picks Sammy up from the two-year-old room, his little brother’s hands always gummy with glue or play-dough or the crust from mud pies.

“Is your mother named Paula?” Sammy’s teacher asks, once she’s seen Dean every school day for a month. Dean goes completely still — doesn’t know what to say, squeezes Sammy’s hand too hard until his little brother tugs it away.

The teacher must read something from the look on Dean’s face, or from the way Sammy launches into action, climbing his brother's leg, digging in with pointy fingers and knobby knees until he's settled against Dean’s hip with his velcro sneakers knocking against Dean's shins.

Sammy immediately starts babbling (Sammy started talking early — filled the silences that had echoed through the car, hummed while he blew spit bubbles and chattered away in a language no one but Dean could understand, loud enough to distract officious waitresses and curious grown-ups and anyone who tried to talk to Dean in the years he didn’t want to talk at all), something about art and fish sticks and the color blue, a waterfall of words separating them from the teacher's kind eyes.

“I only asked because he keeps saying ‘go home to Paula,’” she says, raising her voice to be heard over Dean's little brother, reaching out to ruffle Sammy’s hair and smiling even though he scowls and ducks away, wedges his head in the safe space between Dean's shoulder and his chin. “I couldn’t figure out if he was talking about your mother, or if he’d invented an imaginary friend.”

“’pala!” Sammy shrieks suddenly, clapping his hands, and Dean can’t help his grin when he looks out the nursery window and sees just what Sammy means, pulled up and idling in the pick-up line, waiting for her two boys.

“Um. Yeah,” he stutters, years before he learns how to wink and grin, before he learns how to duck his head and dodge questions about their mom. “Paula. Just his invisible friend, I guess.” He shrugs his left shoulder, his right side weighted down by the little brother wriggling his way back to the floor, now that Dean is talking on his own. “Come on, Sammy,” he says, turning away from the teacher and stretching out his hand to catch fingers crusted with sparkly glue. “Let’s go find ’pala and go home.”


End file.
